Migrate away from MangoPay?

[Changaco]

At some point during the recent disagreement with MangoPay (which resulted in https://github.com/liberapay/salon/issues/52) I wondered if they had competitors we could potentially switch to. A simple web search led me to the blog post Quel prestataire de paiement pour compte de tiers choisir ? Comparatif HiPay, LemonWay, Limonetik, MangoPay, Ingenico, PayPal & Braintree (here's Google's English Translation if you don't speak French).

TL;DR the first two look interesting: HiPay and LemonWay.

Update: Stripe Connect is also becoming interesting.

Moving away from MangoPay would be a lot of work, so the competitor would have to be significantly better. For example:

• lower fees
• a policy more in line with our own neutrality
  • I've already glanced at LemonWay's contract, they're no better than MangoPay on this
• better support of currencies (for #182)
  • support for currency conversion
  • simpler fees than MangoPay

Contracting with another payment operator would involve the legal entity, so ping @liberapay/codirectors.

[MartinDelille]

I would go for the service that would offer support/contribution to Liberapay. Are they aware of the project?

[SimonSarazin]

Helloasso use payzen (i should check if it's still the case) and Ismaël said me that for big amounts the fee is really low.

[Changaco]

PayZen is a different kind of payment processor, it's not suitable for platforms like Liberapay.

[Changaco]

@MartinDelille I haven't contacted anyone yet, so no, they're probably not aware of Liberapay.

What kind of support/contribution did you have in mind?

[MartinDelille]

Liberapay is a nice tool so people from these company could get more involved in the project for personnal/ethical interest.

[Changaco]

@SimonSarazin forwarded me an email concerning payment processors in which someone he knows said we should look into LemonWay if we have a low volume (<2M€/year, we're definitely in that category) and HiPay otherwise. The message also strongly recommended negotiating for lower fees.

[aggsol]

Having multiple payment processors would also add redundancy and mitigate pressure from having just one. As a first step adding more instead of replacing Mangopay would be IMO the way to go.

[Changaco]

Handling multiple payment processors in parallel would be more work than replacing MangoPay with another one. The additional complexity would be similar and possibly higher than the management of multiple currencies.

[Changaco]

It looks like Braintree Marketplace is no longer restricted to platforms based in the US. However I haven't seen anything on their website about compliance with EU licensing requirements for marketplaces, so at this point I'm not sure we can legally use them without getting our own license.

[Changaco]

If we were to integrate PayPal then their Adaptive Payments seem to be what we would need. There are no licensing issues with this as far as I can tell, because we would be transferring donations between PayPal accounts (so PayPal holds the money, not us).

[rpbaptist]

I would not recommend Lemonway. In fact, we are switching away from them.

Their API is not restful at all. You will always get http 200 back and have to dig in the JSON/XML response with single character key values to find out what actually happened.

What's worse is that each currency requires a completely separate environment which also means you will have to do everything twice and mirror their data to keep everything in sync.

Their web interface is incredibly slow and unreliable. It has only client side validation for some forms which is a security risk. I reported this to them and they never did anything with it.

On top of that they are not service orientated at all. Very bureacratic and "computer says no" attitude.

There is a high turnover in personal there as well which is also a red flag. I would definitely not recommend them.

[Changaco]

I have just received an email from mangopay saying that they want to terminate their contract with us because we have/had a few controversial users.

[Changaco]

I've replied, asking for confirmation, and information on how much time we have left.

[Changaco]

I've discovered a payment solution that seems more advanced than most of the others I've seen so far: Treezor - Bank as a Service Platform. A Liberapay account is like a "bank account for donations", so "Banking as a Service" may fit our needs well.

[Changaco]

This blog post in French has some extra info from Treezor. As I expected the section about pricing mentions possible set-up and monthly costs in addition to transaction fees. The section about competitors lists these:

• https://www.wirecard.com/
• http://www.bnkbl.com/
• https://www.solarisbank.com/en/
• https://prepaidfinancialservices.com/en/
• https://www.contis.com/

[Changaco]

Another e-wallet provider (same category as HiPay): Adyen MarketPay.

[albjeremias]

Here one more alternative: Faircoin.

https://fair-coin.org/en/use-cases

Fairpay - "Focused on building a new postcapitalist economy to facilitate the connection between Faircoin and cash in the world." http://fairpay.fair.coop/

[revi]

I don't think we are migrating away to cryptocurrency...

What we need here is a Payment Processor, not a blockchain solution.

[tuxayo]

@albjeremias It would be a nice addition, but IMHO support for EUR and USD at least it absolutely necessary. Otherwise step would be too huge for users. It's already hard to motivate most libre/open source software supporters to setup recurring donations.

[CameronNemo]

@revi there are cryptocurrency payment processors that do automatic settlement in fiat currency. BitPay can do Euros and US dollars, and they have a 1% processing fee. Obviously this would not be a direct replacement for MangoPay, but it could be a nice alternative to support.

This reddit thread shows people struggling to use mangopay: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8wvuhh/liberapay_a_nonprofit_and_opensource_recurrent/e1yu8w9/

Something tells me these people wouldn't find paying with crypto too onerous.

[mattbk]

https://liberapay.com/about/stats shows that 1710 people figured out how to use Liberapay without having issues with Mangopay as of last week. I've paid in to Liberapay from the US and didn't have any issues--but I have no money in cryptocurrency and that would mean an extra step for me.

[MRZA-MRZA]

BitPay was mentioned above (they support BCH!). IMO nowadays it's absolutely necessary to support payments in cryptocurrency.

[Changaco]

I'm impressed by Adyen's documentation, they seem to have built a great payment processing system.

[droidmonkey]

Stripe Connect seems like the most prolific and mainstream out of the bunch.

[fraang]

What kind of controversial users are we talking about here?

[Changaco]

Got an email from someone at Railsbank who saw the Hacker News thread.

[Changaco]

Adyen says Liberapay falls within their Restricted & Prohibited List, so they won't help us.

Update: more precisely, in the "Charities" item of the section "Restricted for all transaction types", which means that they could help us but they won't because Liberapay's transaction volume is peanuts to them.

[MartinDelille]

How is it going with Railsbank?

[Changaco]

Partially relevant article in French: Comment bien choisir sa solution de paiement.

[mattbk]

This blog post in French has some extra info from Treezor. As I expected the section about pricing mentions possible set-up and monthly costs in addition to transaction fees.

@Changaco, did you contact Treezor directly to ask about fees and subscription costs? If they provide a good replacement e-wallet provider, paying reasonable additional costs seem warranted to keep Liberapay afloat and growing.

ETA: I contacted them at https://www.treezor.com/en/contact to ask in general.

[Changaco]

@mattbk I sent them a message in July, never got a response. Wallets are a dead end, so it doesn't matter.

[mattbk]

Wallets are a dead end, so it doesn't matter.

I assume you're referring to your comments at https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com/issues/1171#issuecomment-426244561?

[Changaco]

@mattbk Not really, that comment doesn't say that wallets are a dead end, it only says that we don't really need them. The reason why wallets are a dead end is that they're too similar to bank accounts, and Liberapay can't operate like a bank because it's just a small nonprofit with zero employees. Also there's no such thing as a bank that operates worldwide, but Liberapay needs to be available in as many countries as possible because our users are all over the world. (Relevant toot: https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/100883660682359307.)

[Changaco]

Last week Mangopay posted an article that basically confirms that the donor wallet model Liberapay was built on is becoming a very bad idea because AML requirements are being tightened: AML4 changes.

[mattbk]

Thanks for the explanation. I appreciate it.